Book Reports

[shewhomust]

It seems only proper that books I discovered through LJ should be covered in my LJ, so here's an account (rewritten from my handwritten and not-for-publication books diary) of Elizabeth Bear's Hammered and Scardown.

Apart from the undeniable coolness of being in the middle of reading Scardown at the point at which matociquala won her Campbell award (yeah, I read her when she was still a promising newcomer...), this is the wrong point at which to try to review these books. I might have been able to write about Hammered on its own, as a self-contained novel, but when I reached that very inconclusive ending, there was no way I wasn't going to plunge straight into Scardown. Which leaves me trying to talk coherently about two very tightly linked but also very different novels, knowing that there is a third yet to come. Things that are not entirely satisfactory may yet be resolved: the character of Valens, for example, is clearly not entirely as relayed by Jenny Casey, but equally clearly, some of her accusations are not defused by the fact that he is a loving grandfather with a sympathetic home life and some rather stylish pets.

Usually, the problem with the middle volume of the trilogy is that the exposition, the getting to know the characters and the world, has been completed in volume one, and the resolution must be saved for volume three; volume two may be full of activity, but there's a feeling that we aren't learning anything new. This isn't the case here; the first two volumes are completely different in flavour. Hammered, despite its cyberpunk elements, has much of the crime novel about it: the hard-boiled detective trying to walk down mean streets without herself becoming mean, for starters. Sure, those streets are in a near future in which the world has changed in a variety of ways, and I hesitated to describe Jenny as a detective, but she does set out to resolve a mystery, to find out who is causing a sequence of deaths, to track down the bad guys, so why not? The supporting cast are not stock figures, and to label them as the renegade cop, the gangster with the heart of gold, the sexy female assassin - assassins, in fact - is to oversimplify. But they are also these things. I know my Chandler, not my Micky Spillane, but I wouldn't be surprised if at one level that was Mike Hammered, and having fun with it.

Scardown has a more SF feel to it; the shiny ideas don't so much come into the foreground as blast off into space. I wrote, first time round, that while there was plenty of techno-stuff, there wasn't nothing that struck me as "wow! cool new idea! never thought of that!". Having read matociquala's post this morning on shiny ideas, and how real SF geeks tell her:

There's this thing, and this other thing, and quantum nano-networks, and distributed AI on a synaptic model, and colloidal metallic hydrogen aliens, and this spin on cybernetics that we haven't seen before, and your FTL drive is one of the cooler hacks of quantum physics I've seen.

we'd better put that down to my ignorance. Very well then, let's accept that although there are no breakthrough ideas (yet. I think) there are some elegant refinements and modifications which I would have recognised if I were more up-to-date with contemporary SF. More to my point is that her AI is interesting not because it is distributed on a synaptic model, but because it is a character in the book - and that character is a very plausible Richard Feynman. (A niggle, here: when a second AI personality emerges, he acquires the name Alan. Genie explains that she gave him this name "after Grand-père's dog...". Of course you'd name a computer intelligence after a dog, it's not as if there's any other reason why Alan might be an appropriate name. Trivial, but it bothered me).

Feynman is only one of a number of strong characters: I particularly like Razorface, and am watching his nasty cough with growing concern. Bear has demonstrated that she is quite ruthless with her characters: Mitch and Bobbi (not to mention the Wicked Sister) met a very unpleasant death at the end of Hammered, while Scardown ends with a cataclysm - though it is to be noted that among those who get away are not only several major characters, but also the cat. So perhaps there is hope...

The central character is also the trickiest; she is also the only one written in the first person, which ought to make the reader feel closer to her - but she is clearly an unreliable narrator, not necessarily because she sets out to deceive. Some things are not revealed simply because that is how Point of View works; a person's perception of what is happening here, now, does not include all the history that shapes how they are seeing the present. But the reader needs to know those things, to evaluate the accuracy of what they are being told. Part of the narrative is the story of Jenny's life, told backwards, but from the first that back-story shapes Jenny's behaviour and way of life. So her actions, and her reactions to people and events, are shaped by things the reader (this reader, at least - you have to look out for clues, and I may have missed some) does not yet know. Sometimes I want to shake her (though this would probably be unwise).

In short, gripping narrative, interesting, engaging characters, an authoritative voice: these books have a comfortable shape and weight in my mind, like the heft of a good tool.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

;-) There's a reason *I* might name an AI Alan, but Genie wouldn't likely think of it....

[cpolk.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

But you know, having read the short story about Lady Dunsany's Salon, you don't even have to guess who Alan is...

And - I really Like your review and I'm glad you wrote it. I cannot be coherent when trying to talk about these books so all I can do is mutter "read it, it's good."

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

On the short story, you have the advantage of me: which one, and where? (And I don't think I'm guessing, exactly...)

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Point taken. But it still threw me: personally, I'd have been happier to have it left unexplained, and draw my own conclusions. But then, as you pointed out recently:

(Something I learned ages ago. When people tell you there's something wrong with a story, they're almost always right. When they tell what it is that's wrong and how it can be fixed, they're almost always wrong.)

(That's Neil Gaiman's wording. But the principle's the same...)